Php Frameworks
- Zend Framework
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Zend Framework is our current choice for a Php5 object-oriented framework. The Zend team provides a large set of components which we can drop in to our application designs and coding. Their typically good documentation answers most of our questions while the extensive community of Php developers provide excellent support on the Zend Forums and on the #zftalk IRQ channel.
- Zend Framework website
- Fusebox for Php
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We've retired the Fusebox framework from active duty, however as one of the earliest popular Php frameworks on Php4, it served us quite well. However, as its limitations became increasingly apparent, we decided to switch to the object-oriented Zend Framework, which serves us well, even better.
Php application frameworks provide the basic building blocks of a web application. These include routing the HTTP request to the right Php code that's supposed to handle it to assembling the Html to be sent back to the browser. Php frameworks are especially useful for us since we mostly use the Model-View-Controller architecture to build new web applications.
We toy around with other frameworks, too such as CakePhp, Catalyst for Perl, Ruby on Rails and Django for Python. We've also read and indeed enjoy reading, the documentation and demos of a number of other web application frameworks, from the esoteric (Kepler for the Lua language) to the venerable (CGI.pm in Perl).
Database Frameworks
- Doctrine
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Doctrine is designed for Php 5.2 and above. It provides classes to create complex queries in only a few lines of Php code. We use Doctrine to power the models we design and write for our applications. Letting Doctrine do the routine heavy lifting with the database frees us to deeply contemplate on the optimum design of the model classes and to experiment quickly and safely with data schema changes, and the schemas always change.
- Doctrine website
Object Relational Mappers (ORM) greatly simplify interacting with databases form code. They also typically provide tools to manage change in the database design which tremendously reduces stress on the developers while maintaining a solid and elegant database management process.
JavaScript Frameworks
- jQuery
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- jQuery website
CSS Frameworks
- Blueprint
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- Blueprint website
- Yahoo User Interface Grids
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- YUI website
- Grid 960
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- Grid 960 website
CSS frameworks enable fully CSS-based layouts without tables that work across browsers. We've worked with these three CSS frameworks which sped the styling of the Html markup we've written for our applications.
